The government’s retained EU law bill always was – and still remains – a dangerous stunt, even after a significant change was made to it this week. The bill aims to scrap thousands of laws and rules adopted by UK law while Britain was part of the EU. It was devised by Jacob Rees-Mogg when Boris Johnson was prime minister. It then became the subject of a Brexiter bidding war between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak during the Conservative leadership election last summer, as a result of which a deadline of the end of 2023 was added by Ms Truss for the laws to be wiped from the statute book.
This week, the trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch, announced that the 2023 deadline has now been scrapped. Instead, some 600 EU-derived laws will be removed by the year’s end and the remainder, more than 4,000 at the last count, will be the subject of “assessment and consultation” with a view to most of them also being scrapped eventually. Removing the arbitrary deadline makes the bill a bit less destructive. But it is still dogmatic and dangerous.
The original bill had two central purposes. The first was to expunge EU laws and rules from the UK statute book as a performative act of reclaimed sovereignty by a nation that prided itself for throwing off its supposed vassal status. This gave the bill totemic status among the Conservative party’s Brexit fundamentalists, which has only grown larger since Mr Sunak, of whom the dogmatists are suspicious, alarmed them by reaching a new compromise with the EU over Northern Ireland.
This explains why Ms Badenoch announced the scrapping of the deadline not to parliament, as she should have done, but in the columns of the Daily Telegraph, which headlined its story with the announcement that the “Whitehall ‘blob’” had thwarted the bonfire of Brexit laws. The tactic did the trade secretary no good. On Thursday, during an astonishingly patronising and tin-eared defence in the Commons, her reputation took a battering, as she was denounced spectacularly and rightly by an angry Commons Speaker, mocked by her own indignant Brexiter backbenchers and given no comfort by the outraged opposition benches either.
The U-turn was inevitable. Government by dogma had to give way to government by proper process, as both sides of industry and many campaigners agreed. But the rest of the bill is as destructive as ever. The bill’s other central purpose is to replace any regulation with as little regulation as possible. Mr Rees-Mogg gave that game away when he said that the bill’s objective is “getting regulations that hold the economy back removed”. On this, he and Ms Badenoch are as one. There was no change of policy on deregulation, she told MPs. Indeed, it made it possible to have “more ambitious reforms”.
That claim should set the alarm bells ringing. The Department for Business and Trade has so far identified nearly 5,000 pieces of retained EU law. Around a third cover the environment, food and rural affairs. A further 1,400 deal with business, transport, trade and health and safety. All of these are areas on which ideologues want protections swept away and market forces to be unconstrained. But these rules affect our jobs, our communities, our environment, our food and our land. Most have been carefully and wisely built up over decades, with UK consent, and they are overwhelmingly to the public good. They must not be eradicated in the way this obnoxious bill still threatens.
